Anders Fager: In Love with Leatherface

A new Swedish (a language I accidentally speak by birth) role-playing game landed at my desk a while ago, two big books full of Götterdämmerung – a mystery role-playing game set in the 18th century. “What a strange idea,” I thought. Three hundred and fifty pages of Valmont & vampires? Not that sexy if you ask me. At least that was my very professional opinion.

Still, I could not drop the subject. The guys at Riotminds are professional folks who make excellent products, so they must have seen something I had not. What could be so interesting about Benjamin Franklin meeting or being eaten by Great Cthulhu?

In the end it took one look at the images inside the books to get my overactive imagination going. There was a lot of spooky stuff going on in the 18th century, right? By that time Widow Queen Hedvig Eleonora’s ghost had started to haunt the castle across the channel from where I live. Meanwhile, men like Carl von Linné and Anders Celsius where laying the foundations of science as we know it today and just a few blocks down the road from here Emanuel Swedenborg was busy rewriting the Bible and talking to spirits. Witchcraft was still a crime punishable by death, and it was common knowledge that since womankind was created from a bent rib women often did “bent” things. The New World in America was not that new anymore, and the Ostindian Company was flooding the land with porcelain and silk from China, along with weird stuff, like opium and (you bet) images of gods with octopus-like faces. And the more I think of it, I am also pretty sure that the loot from the sack of Prague in 1656 must have included at least one vampire, with coffin and all. So somewhere in town there is a Bohemian vampire Count sitting in a cellar and being irritated by the long summer nights.

Now, I have not played Götterdämmerung, and this article’s purpose is not to review it. What I am aiming at is rather the first impression that some games project, how some of them grab our attention and interest in an almost brutal manner. I still remember how the first edition of Call of Cthulhu made me ask “Howard Philips who?” and how an hour later I was off to the bookstore to buy everything I could find by the guy. (And that was not much in early 1980s Stockholm.) Or how Kevin Zucker’s The Struggle of the Nations from Avalon Hill fascinated me, not only because of the very small hexagons and the odd rectangular counters, but because it was a wargame with a rulebook that started out with a Lewis Carroll quote that conveyed more of an eerie sense of fate than any “Blood this” or “Death that” title would ever have managed.

On the other hand, there are great games on interesting subjects that almost seem to tell the not-initiated hard-core gamer to stay away – as do the gamers who play them. “Please do not come here and disturb us. We are exclusive.” When some seventeen-year-old leans over the wargaming table at a convention and asks, “What is this?” he gets the reply: “A very difficult game. Please go away.”

I’ve heard this said in real life from, of all people, those who play Advanced Squad Leader, the mother of wargaming hardware fetishism, the guys who actually have the best sales pitch in the hobby: “You drive a Big Tiger Tank.” A while later I saw another guy from the same club spend three hours talking two novices through an ASL scenario with all the guts of a snake-oil salesman. (I do not think he even bothered with showing them the monstrous rulebook before they began.) Everybody had a good time and he won two new gamers to his cause.

Meanwhile the seventeen-year-old kid told to go away has probably found something else of interest. Perhaps he had found some White Wolf book that oozed violence, sexual angst and endless teen sulking from its back pages. (And man, is White Wolf good at violence, sexual angst and endless teen-sulking? Even its booth at Spiel in Essen reeks of violence, sexual angst and endless teen-sulking. Just hover near it and suddenly there you are, sitting on some rooftop, dressed in leather and contemplating the eternal boredom of immortality while longing for that girl in the XXX in not quite legal ways.) Actually, White Wolf is so good at packaging that the artwork on the cards for Vampire: The Eternal Struggle will keep you struggling all the way through one of history’s most boring set of rules just because characters like “Yvette the Hopeless” and “Beast – Leatherface of Detroit” have convinced you that there must be a spectacular game at the end of that godawful little book. (And indeed there is.)

Or our seventeen-year-old spends hundreds of Euros on leaden lumps just because a Games Workshop store literally screamed “WE HAVE COOL THINGS IN HERE!!! PLEEEEEEEASE COME IN!!!!” at him. And man, is Games Workshop good at that. Any aspiring game designer should buy one of GW’s starter kits and just take in the skill the company has achieved in packaging. Forget about the plastic miniatures, the muscular artwork and all the other things that your little project will never be able to afford. Look behind that and learn. Look how they work on feel and storyline, how they make good the promise that within minutes you’ll be in it, too, and how they cap that off with “If you like this, check all this stuff out!” and point you at their websites and catalogues. Any wannabe publisher dismissing GW as a faceless Monster Megacorp that sells games for kids is simply ignorant. Twenty-five years ago GW was a garage outfit, too.

Back to the guys who play “a very difficult game.” There is no universal rule that says a hobby – be it historical gaming or about pretending to be a vampire or anything else – must be inviting to newcomers or care the least bit about recruiting, but why should it not? And if a club or company goes to a convention, shouldn’t it bother to put up a bit of a show to attract attention? Unless the purpose is to just be alone in public, each new gamer even remotely interested means a new potential buddy as well as a new customer.

After all, being smart and slick is free. Nothing stops a small firm from being clever.

Anders Fager is designer of The Hell Game and owner of Gottick Games, which will have both Supermarket Psycho and the forthcoming Fat Load at Spiel 08.

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